The 1990's decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. This advance has been even further accelerated by the extensive consumer and business involvement in the Internet over the past few years. As a result of these changes it seems as if virtually all aspects of human endeavor in the industrialized world requires human/computer interfaces. There is a need to make computer directed activities accessible to a substantial portion of the world's population which, up to a few years ago, was computer illiterate or, at best, computer indifferent.
One function which developers of display interfaces have been addressing is ease of use in the entry of data, and particularly the entry of textual data. No matter how intuitive and easy to use an interface may be in its use of icons and related images to make even the novice user feel at home with the interface, in most human/computer transactions a point is reached when the user must enter data, particularly text data. Unfortunately, most people have limited capabilities with the keyboard which still remains the primary means for entering text into a computer display interface. The user is usually slowed down by the entry of text or related data. This is magnified when the user has to enter the same data repetitively: again and again. In many systems, each time the user needs to access an independent database or even a function, the user must enter a considerable amount of sign on or access information, e.g. names, addresses, IDs, passwords, phone numbers, account numbers, domain names, E-mail addresses etc. This is particularly troublesome when the user is browsing via the Internet where it seems that at every level and Web site, at least some of the same information has to be entered again and again and again. The prior art has described systems in which repetitively used data entries have been stored in the same database along with a variety of display pages or forms which use such entries and then entered into the forms as required. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,367,619 and 5,640,577 describe such databases. While such systems are effective when both the forms requiring the repetitive data and the data entries themselves are stored in the same database, they have substantially no use for interactive display systems which interface with displayed pages from sources independent of the database entries. This is particularly the situation where the interactive computer display is accessing a wide variety of remote databases through networks, especially the Internet.